The FBI just pulled back the curtain on something straight out of a spy movie. On its Huntsville, Alabama campus, the bureau has built a 22,000 square-foot replica town designed specifically to train law enforcement in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks.
It’s called the Kinetic Cyber Range, and it opened back in February 2025. Think fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station, a grocery mart, a courthouse, a hospital, and even a power company. Complete with roads and traffic lights. The whole nine yards.
The idea is simple but clever: get investigators out of the classroom and into a hands-on environment where they can really dig into the consumer and enterprise technologies that hackers actually target. Every inch of this fake town is wired with functioning devices and systems that behave exactly like they would in the real world, but with one crucial safeguard: any simulated attack stays contained within the facility. No spilled-over chaos, no accidentally taking down real infrastructure.
Since opening, the FBI says it’s already trained more than 1,400 students, pulling in personnel from the bureau itself as well as partners from other federal and local agencies.
The scale is genuinely impressive. There’s a data center with over 200 physical servers running a mix of Windows and Linux, mimicking the corporate environments investigators will encounter when they’re responding to a breach or executing a search warrant. Dave Beachboard, the range’s program manager, described the space honestly: “They’re cold, they’re cramped, they’re noisy, they’re dark, they’re miserable.” That’s not marketing speak, that’s the real deal.
And this training couldn’t come at a more critical time. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, based on more than one million complaints, logged a record $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses. That’s a 26% jump from the prior year. Ransomware continues to rank as the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure. We’re not talking about theoretical risks here. This is a massive, growing problem.
The range lets the FBI simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the high-pressure decisions investigators face when responding to incidents that could actually harm people, like hospital systems going dark. It’s one thing to read about that in a manual. It’s another thing entirely to experience the pressure firsthand.
There’s also a darker dimension to this training. The FBI uses the range to train investigators in digital forensics, which involves cracking the cybersecurity defenses of encrypted modern devices to extract data. These tools are controversial because they exploit vulnerabilities that are never disclosed to device makers like Apple or Google. The FBI is essentially teaching agents how to bypass the very protections those companies build in for their users.
It’s a legitimate tension that never really gets resolved in these discussions, and the article doesn’t pretend otherwise. The training is necessary for catching criminals, but the methods raise real questions about privacy and security for everyone else.
This reporting comes from Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch, who covers cybersecurity professionally and authors the weekly newsletter This Week in Security.
The whole thing makes you wonder what the next decade of cybercrime training will look like if we’re already building fake towns to keep up.
